By Ray McCarty, president/CEO, Associated Industries of Missouri
August 2, 2024 - The 2024 Primary Election is less than one week away and ads by the candidates are flooding the airwaves. But have you stopped to wonder how the candidates are paying for these ads/texts/phone calls?
Unfortunately, some of the candidates have received massive contributions from attorneys whose business model includes suing businesses. Some call them trial attorneys, some call them plaintiffs' attorneys, and some names for them are much less flattering. No matter what you call them, they have money to invest in political campaigns because investing even a small portion of the amount they receive from awards and settlements against businesses can pay off in the form of filibusters on the Senate floor, other delays in the legislative process, or even vetoes by a friendly governor.
After watching the money pour into the campaigns for various statewide offices, we decided to take a closer look and report to you the amount of money that has been contributed to the various candidates as you decide who deserves your vote. We are not endorsing any particular candidate, but are providing reliable information directly from reports filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission by the committees for each candidate so you may make an informed decision.
Candidate committees are limited in the amount they may receive from any particular contributor. However, "independent" political action committees (PACs) that support the candidates are not subject to contribution limits. There can be no direct coordination of spending between these independent PACs and the candidates they support, but each of them have an independent PAC. We will focus on these PACs because they receive large contributions from many sources, including the plaintiffs' attorneys.
For the first in a series of articles, we will focus on the top three Republican candidates for governor: Lt. Governor Mike Kehoe, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, and Senator Bill Eigel. Plaintiffs' attorney contributions to Democrat candidates were insignificant compared to the amounts contributed to Republican candidates.
As you view our findings, please remember we only included contributions from law firms that we knew were plaintiff's attorney firms because of advertising on their website or other means. Also, we only included in our totals contributions that were reported by these committees that were received directly from plaintiffs' law firms or PACs that are used to assemble contributions from plaintiffs' firms. As a result, these totals are conservative.
From 2021 to August 1, 2024, two of the candidates' independent PACs received more than one-third of their total contributions from plaintiffs' attorney firms: Sen. Bill Eigel (37.4%) and Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft (37.0%). Only 2.1% of contributions made to the independent PAC supporting Lt. Governor Mike Kehoe were from plaintiffs' attorneys.
Here is how it breaks down:
We plan to do a similar analysis of amounts contributed in other races and will share that information when available. We hope this helps you make a more informed decision as you consider which candidate to support in the primary elections.
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